Largest civil engineering disaster in the history of the United States
Sun Dec 04, 2005 at 06:35:40 AM PDT
Thanks to
Harry Shearer for the heads up on this.
A December 2nd CNN transcript includes an interview and discussion about what really failed in New Orleans. To summarize - the levee system failed due to civil engineer errors.
A Nov 30 article at the The Times-Picayune reports "17th Street Canal levee was doomed Report blames corps: Soil could never hold".
This is an important story and those individuals involved should be held accountable. Let's get this story into the prime light and get our congresscritters and media into investigation mode. (Maybe ePluribusMedia would even carry this flame.)
More on the flip with the news from CNN and nola.com --->
(The nola.com article is below the CNN interview. I believe that CNN reporter Phillips refers to the nola.com article repeatedly without attribution.)
From the 12/02/05 CNN transcript.
PHILLIPS: Now, most of the damage in New Orleans was inflicted not by Hurricane Katrina itself,
but by the subsequent failure of that levee system. Experts say it was the largest civil engineering disaster in the history of the United States and a new report now suggests that 17th Street floodwall was
destined to fail because of engineering errors.
Professor David Rogers is one of the nation's leading forensic engineers. He joins us from St. Louis. And, David, how many times did you actually go to New Orleans and take a look at the levees?
PROF. DAVID ROGERS, UNIV. OF MISSOURI-ROLLA: Well, we had a group that went down there in early October from our Natural Hazards Mitigation Institute, along with the U.S. Geological Survey.
PHILLIPS: OK, and as I -- I was reading through various investigative reports and it looks like it came down to weak soil layers and then this sheet piling that is used to support the floodwalls. Is that right? Did it come down to those two things pretty much failing?
ROGERS: Yes, that's the system that failed. The sheet piles were there just to support the floodwall built on top of the old levee. They did not extend down to great depth that you would need to have a seepage cutoff to keep the water from moving from the river side or drainage side of the levee to the land side of the levee. And that's one of the factors that everybody is asking, you know, why didn't this thing go deeper?
PHILLIPS: All right, so is it the initial design from the very beginning, that was the problem or would that initial design -- would that have worked and would that have been OK if engineers would have just done the regular checkups and been going out and surveying and monitoring the levees on a regular basis, which I have been learning from my understanding that that did not happen.
ROGERS: Yes, that appears to not have happened. We don't know the whole issue on all that yet because there's so many different agencies and there's superposition of one agency taking over for another one, things like this, and a lot of people that are retired and gone, that kind of thing. So, we're still sifting through that evidence.
But the fact that the sheet pile was not deep enough to be an effective seepage cutoff, I think everybody agrees with that. And that's a systemic problem with all three levees that failed in New Orleans.
The Times-Picayune doesn't pull a single punch. From here.
The floodwall on the 17th Street Canal levee was
destined to fail long before it reached its maximum design load of 14 feet of water because the Army Corps of Engineers underestimated the weak soil layers 10 to 25 feet below the levee, the state's forensic levee investigation team concluded in a report to be released this week.
That miscalculation was so obvious and fundamental, investigators said, they "could not fathom" how the design team of engineers from the corps, local firm Eustis Engineering and the national firm Modjeski and Masters could have missed what is being termed the costliest engineering mistake in American history.
Was this a result of corruption? It sounds like there was deliberate deceptions in the engineering to cust costs and line someone's pockets. I've worked with Civil Engineers before and they all have been meticulous and very precise people. I can't imagine how these errors could have been made by accident.
The corps has long claimed the sheet piling was driven to 17.5 feet deep, but Team Louisiana recently used sophisticated ground sonar to prove it was only 10 feet deep.
And it all concludes with the money quote.
Robert Bea, a University of California, Berkeley professor who led a National Science Foundation investigation of the levee failures, said the mistakes made by the engineers on the project were hard to accept because the project was so "straightforward."
"It's hard to understand, because it seemed so simple, and because the failure has become so large," Bea said.
"This is the largest civil engineering disaster in the history of the United States. Nothing has come close to the $300 billion in damages and half-million people out of their homes and the lives lost," he said. "Nothing this big has ever happened before in civil engineering."
Whew. I sure wouldn't want to be working for one of these firms today.
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